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I studied English Literature in college. A lot of you are scratching your heads right now, wondering how I could study under the tutelage of wizened professors 15 hours per week for two and a half years and yet be so clumsy with simple grammar. To which I say, yeah, I don’t know. Let’s just move on.
Anyway, I did not graduate with a degree in English Literature. I did not graduate at all. While I loved sitting in class and dissecting minute points of a novel I did not love where a degree in that field would take me, namely to graduate school. I was barely making it through my undergrad and could not stomach the idea of at least two more years after that, only to end up teaching (And who was I to teach? The slacker who barely handed in her work on time giving assignments to others? Um, no.) or in a job in which I didn’t need my degree to excel. Spending more of my parents’ money on a soon-to-be-unused degree seemed wasteful.
So I dropped out. And as I left college I also left a good part of my love of books. I still love the idea of books. But now that I have active children and participate in Beth Moore Bible studies I cannot sit and read all day. So the books I read had better be worth the time I‘m taking away from my husband or children or friends or house or just blog-reading. I’m infuriated when I get to the end of one, look at it and wonder why I wasted those hours of my life.
Here’s my criteria: 1) It must be well-written. I just finished a book that was trite at best. I don’t want to read a story about normal people with cliché thoughts. I want to read about normal people figuring out the world around them in unexpected ways, as in Sonny‘s Blues by James Baldwin. 2) Don’t cheapen the story and make it overly sad just because you can, as in The Time Traveler’s Wife. [Spoiler!] Authors can bring emotion from their readers without killing off a main character. 3) Also, don’t make the story creepy. I’m talking to you, Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights is disturbing.
My sister Hayley reads quite bit, as does my sister-in-law Amanda, so I keep picking their brains to find out what I should read next. Sunday night I asked my sister for some books and she loaned me Life Is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman, A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich and Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I plan on these being the first books of many in this next year.
I’m determined to once again be a reader, to have my mind stirred by people and situations I would not have otherwise imagined.
I studied English Literature in college. A lot of you are scratching your heads right now, wondering how I could study under the tutelage of wizened professors 15 hours per week for two and a half years and yet be so clumsy with simple grammar. To which I say, yeah, I don’t know. Let’s just move on.
Anyway, I did not graduate with a degree in English Literature. I did not graduate at all. While I loved sitting in class and dissecting minute points of a novel I did not love where a degree in that field would take me, namely to graduate school. I was barely making it through my undergrad and could not stomach the idea of at least two more years after that, only to end up teaching (And who was I to teach? The slacker who barely handed in her work on time giving assignments to others? Um, no.) or in a job in which I didn’t need my degree to excel. Spending more of my parents’ money on a soon-to-be-unused degree seemed wasteful.
So I dropped out. And as I left college I also left a good part of my love of books. I still love the idea of books. But now that I have active children and participate in Beth Moore Bible studies I cannot sit and read all day. So the books I read had better be worth the time I‘m taking away from my husband or children or friends or house or just blog-reading. I’m infuriated when I get to the end of one, look at it and wonder why I wasted those hours of my life.
Here’s my criteria: 1) It must be well-written. I just finished a book that was trite at best. I don’t want to read a story about normal people with cliché thoughts. I want to read about normal people figuring out the world around them in unexpected ways, as in Sonny‘s Blues by James Baldwin. 2) Don’t cheapen the story and make it overly sad just because you can, as in The Time Traveler’s Wife. [Spoiler!] Authors can bring emotion from their readers without killing off a main character. 3) Also, don’t make the story creepy. I’m talking to you, Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights is disturbing.
My sister Hayley reads quite bit, as does my sister-in-law Amanda, so I keep picking their brains to find out what I should read next. Sunday night I asked my sister for some books and she loaned me Life Is So Good by George Dawson and Richard Glaubman, A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich and Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. I plan on these being the first books of many in this next year.
I’m determined to once again be a reader, to have my mind stirred by people and situations I would not have otherwise imagined.
